CHAPTER 103. SEAN AND THE MALVERN MONSTER
It must have happened in the cold of winter, around very late February or early March. She had been back and forth to doctors all Spring. She was feeling poorly again as June began. My mother and grandmother came down and took her to see a Physician in Malvern named Ludwig Clifford Lewis. He specialized in delivering babies. This initial visit was in early June, the 3rd to be exact. He confirmed her suspicion that she was pregnant. She was two months along, he said.
We hadn’t planned a child so soon, although it was one of Lois’ strong desires to have children. We had discussed this before we married and agreed on having four children. We just didn’t want them this early. At least, I didn’t. I wanted to wait until I was making that magic number of $100 a week before we took on the added expense of a child. I still had a way to go; I was making $64 a week.
physically wrong with us. We weren’t sleeping in separate beds like some TV Sitcom couple. We weren’t Shakers, a cult that disbelieved in procreation or having sex. (That cult died out for some reason.) We also were not making use of the remaining 141 condoms given me by my father. And we were certainly not celibate.
Her due date was December 1. We decided if it were a boy we would name him Sean and if a girl, Emily.
Lois was barely showing, although she had put on some extra pounds in just the past months. She continued to work, riding in on the Paoli train with me as usual. I know the impact on us financially was weighing on her mind, but I felt we would just have to deal with it. Otherwise our life went on as it had been. On July 20 I brought my grandmother up to our place to help Lois prepare a picnic lunch for the next day. We were going with Dave Claypoole and his wife into the country on the 21st, which we did.
We went to my parents for supper on July 24. We were also there on the 27 and 29. We drove up looking for them on August 2 and eventually found them at the Goshen Fair. On August 3 we came up at noon for breakfast while my dad fixed my car. It was leaking oil. Lois went into Pottstown with my mom and grandmother. I mowed my parents yard. Everything was pretty much normal.
That Monday morning, August 5, Lois wasn’t feeling well. She decided to call in sick and I rode to work alone. Later I got a phone call from her.
“I think I’m going into labor,” she said.
“Did you call the doctor?”
“Yes. But I’m scared. I think I am. Can you come home?”
I clocked out. I had to catch a train and it took me well over an hour to get to my house. When I got there and opened the front door everything was quiet. There was no sign of my wife. I hurried to the bedroom and found her in bed. She looked awful. Her face was pale and streaked from crying. Her hair was a mess.
“He wouldn’t believe me,” she blubbered out. “He wouldn’t come.”
“Who?”
“The doctor. I called him again after talking to you. I told him I was going into labor. He said that was impossible, I was imaging it. He said I was overdramatizing the pain, but would send a prescription for the pain and not to bother him anymore about it.
“Then I lost it.” She began crying. “Right after I lost it the drugstore delivery came. I had to put on my robe and go to the door. I had blood running down my legs.”
“Did you call the doctor again?” I asked.
“Yes. Just before you got home. He said he would come.”
“Where’s the baby?”
“In the bathroom.”
I went into the bathroom. There was a basin sitting on top of the toilet tank with a towel over it. I lifted the towel. It was a boy. He looked absolutely perfect. I re-covered him and went back to Lois. Just then the doorbell rang. It was Doctor Lewis. I let him in.
“Where is she?” he asked rather brusquely.
“In the bedroom.”
He brushed by me into the bedroom. I called my parents and told my mom who answered. She said they would come. I don’t know why, but my dad was home instead of on the road. I hung up as Doctor Ludwig Clifford Lewis came out of the bedroom.
“How is she?”
He paused only briefly. I looked straight into his hard, heartless eyes for that moment.
“She’s fine,” he said hurriedly heading to the front door.
“What do we do with the baby?” I asked.
He had his hand on the knob. “I don’t care what you do with it,” he said. “You can put it in the trash for all I care.” With that he hurriedly left.
I wanted to run after him and punch him in the nose, no, to strangle him. If ever I had murder on my heart it was at that moment.
Lois was calling me. I went in, sat on the side of the bed, held her hand and stayed with her until my folks arrived. Lois said she was afraid I’d hate her. Why would I hate her?
I didn’t have loving thoughts about Doctor Ludwig Clifford Lewis though.
My parents and grandmother stayed a while. When they left my dad went into the bathroom and took away the baby, little Sean as we called him, wrapped in the towel. My mother cleaned up the place. My dad buried the baby somewhere out in the field where he put all the deceased pets. I don’t know if that was legal or not. There was no one advising us differently. The Doctor said to put it out with the trash.
could any decent human being suggest such a thing at such a time? Ludwig Clifford Lewis did not deserve his title of Doctor. He was a mean, cruel person. He died in 2015 from stroke complications. He couldn’t have died of heart attack not having one.
In his obituary it said this, “He made sure he was available for his patients. If someone with a cut and it was the middle of dinner, he’d stop and sew hem up. He was a good old-fashioned country doctor.” So where was he during August 5, 1963, that he couldn’t take time to attend my wife? Why did this bozo tell her “labor was impossible and it was all in her imagination”. Then when his heedless ignoring her pain resulted in the death of the baby, essentially a murder of neglect by this quack, he had the gull to say, “throw the baby in the trash.” The man was a monster. . (Pictured is the home at the address given for his practice.)
I have many times asked myself the question of how somebody could be that cold and mean. How can you ignore a woman’s pleas to come attend to her when she believes she is losing her baby, and how can you tell anyone who has went through such agony that the baby is just trash that can be chucked away with the rest of the daily debris of life.
My dad said burying the baby was the hardest thing he ever had to do.
I refer to the child as Sean, the name we had picked out if we had a boy, which is what we had. Lois preferred not to place a name on it. This was hard on me, but much worse on her, not just physically, but psychologically. This event was probably the trigger to other problems Lois had.
Lois’ difficulty physically was two-fold, a womb in the wrong position and an incompetent cervix. The womb misalignment was a birth defect that surgery later fixed. Whether the incompetent cervix was the cause of this premature birth or caused by it is an unknown. At any rate, Lois could not retain a fetus after the fifth month of pregnancy due to the weight. Of course we did not know any of this until several years after the loss of Sean.
Lois’ psychological problems were more complex and predated this although they grew more and more apparent after this event. Looking back there were certain signs in her letters to me and in her behavior, but I only saw these after the fact. Lois suffered manic-depression, or Bipolar Disorder. We didn’t find this out until decades later.
Both her physical and psychological difficulties would play a major roll in our lives going forward when we didn’t know why certain things happened over the next two decades. The result of our ignorance about her conditions was not just going to affect us emotionally, but also financially. It was not going to take long for this to manifest itself.
There were also a number of psychological and emotional problems about to rock my mind as well. In the summer of 1963 my career seemed solid and improving. By the summer of 1965 I would believe everything was over for me. Between those two seasons a lot happened.
Lois went back to work the next week after the stillbirth. She was further upset by the demeanor of her boss and fellow employees. She found them insensitive to her loss. Two days after she lost Sean, on August 7, Jacqueline Kennedy had an emergency C-section to deliver a son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy He was 5 ½ months premature. A good deal of fuss was made over this birth by the media. This was the first White House Baby since Grover Cleveland. However, the Kennedy baby quickly developed breathing problem, now called infant respiratory distress syndrome and died on August 9, 1963.
constantly harping on the death of the First Lady’s boy. When Lois returned to work the next Monday she found everyone talking about the Kennedy tragedy and showing sympathy to Jacqueline while basically ignoring her own situation. Lois knew how Jacqueline must be feeling, but could not understand how people she knew couldn’t understand she had the same feelings. “At least,” she said, “Jackie has two healthy children.”
I returned to work to the same, especially since the Mailroom Supervisor was a Kennedy Fanatic. Bill Mayberry had a picture of John F. Kennedy on his desk next to one of his family. He practically worshiped Jack Kennedy and he had to restrain himself from crying over Jacqueline’s child’s death. I was aware that my own loss paled in these people’s minds to the loss of a famous person that they really didn’t know. It is the reality in a country of celebrity worship.
I was too busy to worry about other people’s thoughts. I had a Speedaumat Unit to organize and run, plus I was still attending evening college at Temple. Meanwhile Lois gradually came back to her normal self. She stopped sulking about it or being angry with the Doctor and her fellow employees. She talked about having a child in a couple years.
The water was cold. She felt pain in her gums drinking it and the ice cubes bumping her upper-lip were annoying. She set the glass on the nightstand, dipped two fingers and dabbed the chilly drops on her forehead. They slid down the sides of her nose into her eyes. She blinked.
She inched across the width of the bed and by stretching both body and one arm was able to raise the window shade. The sky was now a framed picture in the wall. She held the pull loop tightly, squeezing until the slicing pain in her side eased and then she let it go and fell back against her pillow. She was exhausted.
Her pillow was hot. Her short hair twisted and prickled her neck. The room was like an oven. She wished the window were open or even the door.
Yellow light shown through the crack at the bottom of the closed door and voices seeped through from the room beyond. The muffled voices made it impossible to understand the words. The tone was discernible and by it she could tell the speaker. Her husband’s voice was controlled, but weary with a touch of anger.
She wished their neighbors would go. They came out of kindness inquiring to her feelings, but they refused to leave and she found that cruel. They had paid their social debt why didn’t that satisfy them?
There was a change in tone. Her husband had stopped talking. Maggie Braum took up the conversation. She was shrill and high-pitched. Maggie was probably rehashing the facts, making certain she had the story from beginning to end, memorizing her talking points for tomorrow’s round of koffeeklatches. What would Maggie tell?
Tell them about Dr. Lewis, please, she thought. She dragged the sheet halfway over her face. Just tell them about him
***Later***
“The doctor didn’t say go to the hospital or anything when he was in here?”
“No,” she said, “he didn’t tell me anything.”
She turned her head away to look out at the sky again.
“What are you looking at, Jeannette?”
“The stars. Aren’t they beautiful? I was wondering what was beyond space.”
“Oh.”
“Do you think there’s a big brick wall someplace?”
“To hit our heads against?”
“Yes,” she half laughed, “something like that.”
“What’s behind the wall?” he asked.”
“Huh?” She puzzled. “I don’t know if there’s anything beyond the wall.”
“Then why are we banging our heads against it?” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Come on,” he said, “we’re still young. We have lots of time.”
He got up from the bed. She still stared out the window.
“Doctor Lewis did tell me something,” he said.
“What?” She turned to look at him.
“I asked him what should we do with the baby.”
“What did he say?”
“Anything we wanted,” he said. “Then he said, ‘You can toss it out with the garbage for all I care’.”
“My God!”
“I wanted to punch him.”
“Today was so ugly,” she said.
“Yeah, but it’s over,” he said. “Look, it’s a beautiful star-filled night. The sun will be out tomorrow.”
“Honey?”
“So am I strange?” she asked. “I mean about space and the brick wall?”
“Anybody would feel strange after what happened.”
“Frank, what’s behind the wall?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Let’s try to find out.”
“Okay.”
Excerpts from “A Beautiful Star-Filled Night” (1964)
In my collection, Daily Rhapsody.
I passed my Sociology Course and prepared for the Fall Semester, which would be more demanding.
Ronald Tipton mustered out of the Army. The Army offered him a bonus to re-up and go to some exotic place called Vietnam, but on the advice of an Army buddy he declined the offer. He lived in Pittsburgh for a while after turning in his uniform, but was now back in our area. He had a job and apartment in Coatesville. He wrote us on August 21, 1963.
“I would like to extend an invitation for you to visit my home anytime you so desire. As of yet I don’t have a telephone but you can call my mother or write if you should desire to visit.”
On August 25 I replied.
“We are quite glad to here (sic) that you have finally found that elusive occupation which you were seeking.
“We are both, also, rather anxious to see you again. The evening of the day that we received your note we drove to Coatesville and found your place.
“If it should please you how about this Saturday evening (Aug. 31) or better yet, Sunday (Sept. 1). I imagine we both have a lot to catch up on.”
As it turned out we had more to catch up on than we bargained for.
afterward we sat around and talked about old times. Lois was kind of lost for much of this palaver, until we touched on the subject of Philadelphia. She had lived in the city as a child and then nearby in Upper Darby. She was able to explain about some of the places in Philly. (Pictured right Ronald’s apartment in Coatesville.)
Near the end of the evening, Ronald said he had something he wanted to tell us about. Someone he knew gave him the name of a men’s club in Pittsburgh , he said. The person told him when he got home he might visit it. He thought at first he wouldn’t go, but after a while he decided to. It was a nice place, he said. They had dancing. There were only men and he danced with some. He enjoyed it. He would probably go again.
We said our good nights soon afterward. Lois and I drove back to Malvern. We didn’t quite know what to make of Ron’s strange story. It took a while to sink in.
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